Scholarly Groups Choose Between Speech and Silence on War

Inside Higher Ed

Ryan Quinn

February 16, 2024

When the American Association of University Professors last week called for “an immediate ceasefire and end to the siege of Gaza,” it was just the latest union to endorse the same labor movement statement. 

But the AAUP isn’t only a union. It’s the paramount national faculty group in the U.S., and its academic freedom guidelines seek to protect even controversial, and dissenting, speech. Now, by signing the Gaza statement, the AAUP has itself taken a position in the most contentious campus debate of recent times.

After the decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict exploded into yet another war on Oct. 7, students, professors, alumni and others criticized various university presidents for either not commenting on the violence against either Israelis or Palestinians, or both, or for commenting poorly on it. The current crisis intensified a debate that has carried on from the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and, much longer ago, the Vietnam War: When, and how, should universities, their leaders and their academic departments comment on current political controversies?

But less media attention has been paid to the academic groups that bring together faculty members from multiple colleges and universities. These include the pan-faculty AAUP and academic disciplinary associations.

These organizations have, like universities, differed in whether, and how, they’ve spoken about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Some have likewise faced controversies for their stands, with critics questioning whether scholarly associations should take positions in political controversies—and some arguing that they weren’t being fair to their Jewish or Israeli members in the stands they took.

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